Kovalyov opened his kitbag. To forestall mocking looks, he spread out a map of the sector and pretended to study it as he took out his few belongings—silent witnesses to his short, poor and pure life. A tobacco pouch with a red star, made for him by his elder sister, Taya, from the sleeve of a colourful, once smart dress. He could remember this dress from when he was only eight. Taya had worn it for her wedding to Yakov Petrovich, an accountant from the district town. When people asked Kovalyov, “Goodness, where did you get such a fine pouch?” he would reply, “My sister gave it to me when I was still at military school.”
Next, he looked at a small calico-bound exercise book with worn edges. In faded, once gilt letters, it bore the title NOTEBOOK. His teacher had given it to him when he began his last year at the village school. In it, in a large, splendid hand, Kovalyov had written down poems and popular songs: “A sultry summer,” “My proud love,” “A people’s war, a holy war,” “Katyusha,” “My soul is a thousand years old,” “My little blue shawl,” “Farewell, beloved city” and “Wait for me.”
On the very first page was a poem by Lermontov. The lines “Eternal love is not possible, / Any other love is not worth the trouble” had been boldly yet neatly underlined in both blue and red pencil.
Between the pages lay four tickets for the Moscow metro, and tickets for the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of the Revolution, the Moscow zoo, the “Union” cinema and the Bolshoy Theatre—souvenirs of Kovalyov’s two days in Moscow in November 1940.
Then he took out a second notebook—summaries he had made of tactics lectures at military school. He was proud of this notebook; he was the only member of his group to have been graded Excellent for tactics.
Next came a photograph, wrapped in cellophane, of a girl with fierce eyes, a snub nose and a rather masculine mouth. On the back, in indelible ink, was written,
Laughter and joy are easy to share,
But a friend in need is rare indeed—
And the only friend who deserves your care.
Remember me—Vera Smirnova.
In tiny capitals, inside a small rectangle drawn in the top right-hand corner, were the words, “In place of a stamp, a passionate kiss.”
Kovalyov smiled a little sadly and returned the photograph to its crackly cellophane. Then he took out his more material belongings: a wallet with a wad of red thirty-rouble notes; a purse containing two spare squares for his collar tabs; his spoils of war—a German razor and a German cigarette lighter; a red plastic pencil; a compass; a little round mirror; an unopened packet of cigarettes; and a huge, particularly impractical penknife in the shape of a tank.
He looked around, listened both to the continuing rumble in the distance and to the silence nearby, opened the packet of cigarettes with one fingernail and lit up. Then he turned to Sergeant Major Marchenko—his right-hand man now that Politinstructor Kotlov was wounded—and said, “Have a smoke!”
Glancing at the treasures spread out beside him, he added, “I couldn’t find the fuses for my grenades. I’ve had to turn out the whole bag.”
“Why bother?” said Marchenko. “We’ve got more than enough fuses.” He carefully pulled out a cigarette. Before lighting up, he rotated it between his thumb and forefinger and examined it from all sides.
31
ONLY IN Stalingrad did Pyotr Semyonovich Vavilov come to understand what war truly meant.
A huge city had been killed. Some buildings, however, remained hot from the fire. As he stood on sentry duty in the dusk, he felt the warmth still breathing deep in the stone. To him it seemed to be the living warmth of those who until recently had lived in these buildings.
Before the war Vavilov had visited several different towns and cities, but it was only here, amid these ruins, that he understood the vast amount of labour that went into building a city.
Back in his village, Vavilov had found it extraordinarily difficult to obtain a small pane of glass, a batch of factory-made bricks, window catches for the hospital windows, awnings to put over the school doors, or an iron girder for a mill they were building. Nails were in such short supply that they were accounted for individually rather than by weight. It had been difficult to obtain dry, seasoned wood, rather than still-damp spruce, for the school roof. A new floor for the village school had been a source of constant anxiety and taken an inordinate amount of time to complete. A building roofed with corrugated iron had seemed like a mansion.
The ruined buildings of Stalingrad revealed the wealth that had gone into their construction. Thousands of sheets of twisted corrugated iron lay scattered over the ground; stretches of street hundreds of metres long were covered by dead mounds of precious brick; pavements glittered, as if covered in fish scales. To Vavilov it seemed that the glass now carpeting the pavements would have been enough for the windows of every village in Russia. Wherever he looked, there were screws, door handles, bits of chewed-up iron and nails made soft by the wild, drunken flames. Huge steel rails and girders lay torn and twisted.
Much sweat had gone into hewing rough stone, into extracting copper and iron from their ores, into turning sand into glass and bare rock into rows of steel girders. Thousands of teams of masons, carpenters, painters, glaziers and metalworkers had worked here year after year, from dawn until dusk. Everything—the brickwork, the masonry, the layout of stairwells—had required skill, strength and labour.
Now, though, the streets were cratered by bombs, and some of these craters were the size of a haystack. And these countless pits and craters exposed a second, underground, city—water pipes, central-heating boilers, concrete-lined wells, thick telephone cables and intricate webs of electricity cables.
An unimaginable amount of work and material had been destroyed, in some monstrous act of desecration. In the Transvolga steppe Vavilov had already met many of the people who had once lived in these buildings: orphans, old men, crazed, shaking old women and young women carrying babies. There was no knowing how many more women, children and old people now lay in stone tombs under these mounds of brick.
“This is Hitler,” Vavilov said aloud.
The three words went on echoing in his mind: “This is Hitler.”
For Hitler, strength was a matter of violence—one man’s ability to exercise violence over another. To Vavilov—and millions like him—it was a matter of the power of living breath over dead stone.
What we call the soul of the people is determined by a shared understanding of strength, labour, justice and the common good. When we say, “The people will condemn this,” “The people will not believe this” or “The people will not agree,” it is this shared understanding that we have in mind.
This shared understanding—these simple and fundamental thoughts and feelings—is present both in the people as a whole and in each individual. Often only latent, this understanding comes to life when someone feels him- or herself to be united with a larger whole, when someone can say, “I am the people.”
Those who say that the people worship strength must differentiate between different kinds of strength. There is a strength that the people respect and admire, and there is a strength that the people will never respect, before which it will never abase itself.
32
ALL THROUGH the morning pulverized, shell-shattered brick hung in the air. Mingling with dust flung up by steel-soled boots and exploding shells and mortar bombs, it formed a flickering cloud.
German observation officers climbed to the higher floors of half-destroyed buildings. In the quivering midday air, they looked out through smashed windows and caught sight of the Volga. The huge river was astonishingly beautiful, its delicate blue reflecting a cloudless sky, its sea-like expanse sparkling in the sun. Its moist breath on their sweat-covered faces felt pure and tender.
On the streets beneath them, German infantry battalions continued to move forward between empty stone boxes still hot from the fire. Tanks, armoured cars and self-propelled guns negotiated sharp corners, squealing and grinding. Motorcyclists
circled drunkenly around city squares, their uniforms unbuttoned and with no covering on their heads.
City dust merged with smoke from field kitchens, the smell of burning with the smell of pea soup.
Sub-machine-gunners shouted and gesticulated gaily as they herded prisoners of war in dirty, bloody bandages to the western outskirts, along with crowds of civilians—bewildered women, children and old people.
Infantry officers kept clicking their cameras. Not trusting their memories, they noted down details in small notebooks destined to become family heirlooms—testimonies to a glorious day, to be bequeathed to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Soldiers with ash-grey cheeks and dry lips entered empty apartments; sometimes their steps echoed on intact parquet floors. They peered into cupboards, shook blankets and knocked rifle butts against walls.
And as had happened before, amid all the rubble, they miraculously managed to find bottles of vodka and sweet wine.
The streets were full of the shrill music of mouth organs. From behind smashed windows could be heard wild singing, loud laughter and the stomp of dancing soldiers. Here and there the soldiers had found gramophones and were playing records by Soviet singers. Amid the raucous excitement, Lemeshev’s tenor and Mikhailov’s bass sounded lonely and sad.
And there was both sadness and surprise in the voice of a young woman singing, “And just what he thinks of me, what makes him wink at me, is anyone’s guess.”24
As they reappeared on the streets, the soldiers were still stuffing their calfskin knapsacks with loot from abandoned apartments: stockings, blouses, reels of thread, towels, vodka glasses, cups, knives, spoons of all sizes. Some patted their bulging pockets. Some, looking from side to side, ran through the square; a ladies’ luxury shoe factory was rumoured to be just round the corner.
Drivers filled their trucks with carpets, rolls of fabric, sacks of flour and crates of spaghetti. Tank men and armoured-car drivers had opened the hatches of their vehicles and were tossing in bedspreads, quilted blankets, women’s coats and curtains just ripped down from windows.
From the streets close to the Volga could be heard mortar fire and the rattle of machine guns and sub-machine guns, but few men were listening.
Up on the highest balcony of a three-storey building facing east, a non-commissioned officer in camouflage overalls and a face veil was shouting imperiously into a telephone mouthpiece, “Feuer! Feuer! Feuer!”25 In obedient response to his commands and gestures, guns beneath the trees on the boulevard let out deafening roars; forked tongues of yellow and white flame leapt from their muzzles.
An armoured staff car drove up at speed, turned sharply in the middle of the square and came to a stop. A thin general with a hooked nose, a scarred face and yellow gaiters on his bandy legs got out and took a few steps. His monocle catching the light, he looked up at the sky, glanced at the buildings around the square, gestured impatiently with his gloved hand, said a few words to an officer who ran up to him, got back into his car and set off in the direction of the railway station.
This was how the Germans had imagined the last day of the war—and it seemed they had not been mistaken.
After long weeks in the steppe, the smell of burning, of red-hot stone and melting asphalt, was intoxicating. The hot flickering mist seemed to have penetrated deep inside them. Even their heads were on fire.
Time and again the Germans had seen the Volga on maps—an incorporeal, pale blue vein. And now here it was—the Volga herself, full of life and movement, splashing against the stone embankment, rocking logs, rafts, boats and pontoons on her broad breast. And there could be no doubt what this meant: the Volga meant victory!
Yet not every German was looting and celebrating. Paulus had driven a wedge into the heart of the city, but there was still fighting where this wedge bordered streets held by Soviet troops. Tanks fired point-blank at doorways and windows. Gun teams struggled to drag their guns up to bombed-out buildings on the high cliffs over the Volga. Signallers sent up coloured flares. Machine-gunners fired burst after burst into dark cellars. Snipers crept along the edges of gullies. Twin-fuselage spotter planes hung in the air. Soviet radio monitors on the east bank had to listen again and again to the guttural cries of the German artillery observers. Their commands seemed to be echoing across the Volga: “Feuer! Feuer! Gut! Sehr gut!”26
33
CAPTAIN Preifi, the commander of a grenadier battalion, chose the ground floor of a still-intact two-storey house as the location of his command post.
The house stood immediately to the west of the massive carcass of a bombed-out tall building. Preifi reckoned that, should the Russians conduct artillery fire from the east bank, the house would be well protected.
His battalion had been first to enter the city. During the night of 10–11 September, Lieutenant Bach’s company, following the course of the River Tsaritsa, had reached the west bank of the Volga. Bach had reported that the company’s advance outposts were now positioned beside the water. Their large-calibre machine guns were subjecting the main road on the east bank to constant fire.
There had been previous occasions when the battalion had been first to enter a conquered city and the soldiers were accustomed to marching along deserted streets, to the particular smell of burning buildings, to the crunch of smashed brick and glass beneath their boots, to general astonishment at the sight of their grey-green uniforms, to the way some people said nothing, some tried to hide away and others smiled falsely as they tried to come out with a few words in German.
They had, many times, been the first Germans that the local inhabitants had encountered. And so they saw themselves as the embodiment of all-conquering force, of a force that destroys iron bridges, transforms huge buildings into heaps of rubble and evokes horror in the eyes of women and children.
So it had been throughout the campaign.
Nevertheless, entering Stalingrad had felt different; it had meant more to them than entering other cities. Before the attack, the deputy corps commander had come to talk to them all, and a propaganda-department representative had filmed them and distributed an information sheet. A Völkischer Beobachter correspondent, an important and knowledgeable figure who had himself endured all the hardships of the previous year, had interviewed three veterans. As he was leaving, he had said, “Dear friends, tomorrow I shall witness, and you will take part in, the decisive battle. To enter this city means we have won the war. Beyond the Volga, Russia comes to an end. We will meet no further resistance.”
All the newspapers—not only the army newspapers but also those brought by plane from faraway Germany—bore huge headlines: “Der Führer hat gesagt: ‘Stalingrad muss fallen!’’27 The colossal losses the Soviets had suffered were listed in bold. There were figures for numbers of prisoners of war, for tanks and guns and for aircraft captured at airfields.
Soldiers and officers alike believed that the final, decisive day of the war had now dawned. They had, admittedly, believed this more than once before, but the mistaken hopes of the past served only to confirm that their present convictions were well founded.
“After Stalingrad we can all go home,” everyone was saying.
It was rumoured that the Supreme Command had already decided which divisions would remain as an army of occupation.
Bach had pointed out to Preifi that there were huge spaces yet to be taken. Moscow was still holding out. There were Soviet armies still held in reserve. And then there was England and America.
“Nonsense,” Preifi had replied. “If we take Stalingrad, the remaining armies will scatter, and England and America will make peace with us straightaway. We can go back home, leaving only a few units to serve as a garrison and to flush out any last partisans. But we must take care not to end up in one of those units ourselves. The last thing we want is to moulder away for years in some foul-smelling provincial Russian town.”
During the night Bach crept down to the Volga and scooped up some water in his helmet. At dawn, when the
battalion had consolidated its position and the shooting had quietened, he took the water to the command post and offered it to Preifi.
“Very good,” said Preifi. “But the water hasn’t been boiled and it may contain Asiatic cholera bacteria. To be on the safe side, we’d better mix it with Stalingrad alcohol.” He winked and added, “A little water and plenty of alcohol.”
They did as he suggested. After they had clinked glasses and drunk, Bach raised one hand and said, “Let’s have five minutes’ silence. We can each write a quick postcard to our families, saying that we’ve drunk from the Volga.”
“What an excellent, truly German thought!” Preifi replied.
Bach wrote to his fiancée about the southern stars looking down on the black river. The Volga’s moist breath was the breath of history.
Captain Preifi wrote that, as he raised the mug of Volga water to his lips, he had imagined himself in the bosom of his family. He had felt he could smell the fresh, still-warm milk that his wife would bring him one clear morning in the coming spring. It was a joy to be thinking of his nearest and dearest during these splendid days.
Rummer, the battalion chief of staff, who saw himself as a profound strategist, wrote to his elderly father about the glorious breakthrough the Wehrmacht would soon make to the east, into Persia and India. There they would meet up with the Japanese advancing from Burma and Indochina. A chain of steel would then encircle the globe—and it would endure for a thousand years.
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